Preseason Dev Update Number 2!

Hey everyone!
We&rsquo;re still hard at work on this year&rsquo;s preseason and I wanted to jump in with another update of our work in progress. If you missed the first update, it&rsquo;s posted [here](https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/8iZVJvTA-preseason-development-update-1)
Our primary aim this preseason is to generally improve the quality of the time spent you spend in game. We want to keep you in striking distance of a comeback, but if you&#039;re really really far behind, the opposing team should be able to get you out of that lost game quicker. I Our four main goals are listed below with their corresponding changes.
Rune paths no longer dictate stat bonuses
https://i.imgur.com/uE92eDc.jpg
After a bunch of iterations and testing we&rsquo;ve settled on a &ldquo;pick 3&rdquo; system for stats:
* 1 slot is offensive stats only
* 1 slot is defensive stats only
* 1 slot is &ldquo;free&rdquo; choice of offense or defensive stats
The updated stats options we&rsquo;re testing:
* Offensive - Attack Damage, Ability Power, Attack Speed, Scaling Cooldown Reduction
* Defensive - Armor, Magic Resist, Scaling Health
Stuff we&rsquo;ve cut or are not currently considering
* HP regen - this ends up making lanes where nobody ever dies
* Flat CDR - In particular this option didn&rsquo;t leave us any way to easily tune it. Any amount of CDR that isn&#039;t a multiple of 5 or 10 doesn&rsquo;t integrate well into the other options you have from items/runes.
* Scaling resists - These fall into a category where they aren&rsquo;t bad design but when we overall want to limit each slot to ideally 3, maybe 4 choices these didn&rsquo;t make the cut. By the late game these resists are overshadowed by items so the up front resists were more interesting.
Overall we&rsquo;re pretty happy with how the system lets you build a well tailored set of stats that enhance your champion&rsquo;s strengths without a lot of the deadweight that existed in the old system. Defensive choices allow you to make some strategic choices around your opponent/s.
&ldquo;Do I try to counter my lane opponent or prepare for the late game?&rdquo;
&ldquo;Do I greed into double offense or play it safe with defense?&rdquo;
**Laning Phase is improved and slightly longer**
https://i.imgur.com/yATsgHo.png
TLDR for those who didn&rsquo;t read the last update - outer turrets will have a barricade in the early game that makes them more durable, but you can break off pieces of it for gold rewards.
Since we last updated, these barricades haven&rsquo;t had any major directional shifts, and as we continue to polish them it&rsquo;s feeling more and more like a natural part of the game flow. The goal here is that the power and balance of lane matchups are still similar, but turrets live longer and are more satisfying to interact with since there are multiple pieces to destroy and rewards to collect. We also want to reduce some of the feels bad cases of a turret falling at 7 minutes after one jungle gank when the lane was in a good position.
**Comebacks are more achievable and satisfying**
Integrating minion farm into bounties is still shaping up to be a promising change because it&rsquo;s creating a more accurate reward for killing a player with more gold power than you. Additionally we&rsquo;re continuing to tune the exact method and amount of gold this should contribute. Our rough estimate right now is that the average bounty of a fed champion should be 70% champion kill gold based and 30% minion/monster farm based.
In our efforts to make comebacks more achievable we don&rsquo;t want to push bounties so high that they just seem unreasonable. So the other tactic we&rsquo;re taking is to reduce bounties for players when their team is overall behind (in gold). Bonus is that we&rsquo;re softening a super bad feeling moment where you&rsquo;ve been the only winning lane in a tough game, only to die and give up a ton of gold to the enemy when your team is already behind.
**Decided games resolve faster**
Scaling up minion health and turret damage resistance more in the late game continues to test well. This change has proven to help teams that are going to win do so faster, but not make it much harder for the behind team to fight back in matches that are still recoverable. Not a lot of new info to report here since last time.
We&rsquo;re also making a change to how minions scale their movement speed. We&rsquo;re replacing the old system where minion movement speed scaled up based on how many turrets had been killed in that lane with a simpler mechanic of minions simply gaining MS over game time. This is a more neutral mechanic that allows teams that are behind in turrets to make a counter push if they can win a team fight.
**Feedback so far**
We&rsquo;ve just recently completed some very informative player labs where we brought in a bunch of players from different skill levels and had them test these changes for a full weekend. As always this got us a ton of useful feedback to work on, and it also get us even more hyped and confident to put this stuff out for you all to see soon. We&rsquo;re aiming to do a longer than normal PBE period for these changes so we can also make sure everything is working similarly to what we observed during internal testing. Expect our next round of info to be much closer to PBE, and you&rsquo;ll see more details from the designers working closely with each feature.
Riot MapleNectar
Bonus Image! We just got the first models into game last night, Nunu &amp; Willump have been hard at work...now they just need a paintjob (and a few more tweaks to the model).
https://i.imgur.com/Hv8ZswR.png

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